Head-mounted computer with spit, bailing wire

Oh, for crying out loud! While we were all giddy reporting on yesterday’s wonderfully done head-mounted computer, [Andrew Lim] of recombu.com comes along and essentially does the same thing with an HTC Magic handset and three dollars worth of Harbor Freight crap. Linux kernel, WiFi, accelerometer, the whole nine yards. Consider our collective ass handed to us.

Funny thing is, either of these could be considered The Consummate Hack. One flaunting the creator’s know-how with its custom-designed parts and delicate engineering, the other exhibiting a more punk flair with random scraps and off-the-shelf technology achieving much the same effect — a solution so obvious we were blind to it. Whatever your outlook, this is a great day to be a hacker!

@Ben Ryves
You could write a custom application to show stereoscopic views side by side and put a divider in the middle of the box to achieve a similar effect. Granted, that’s a lot of work, but I guess it depends on just how immersive you want it.

I don’t see how having a 2″ screen right up against your face is “immersive”. In fact, I don’t see how this is any different than using the same device in a dark room.
If it had head tracking or stereoscopy he might be able to argue that it was “virtual reality” (which is an ill-defined and meaningless term, anyhow), and if he wrote some code that made use of the phones camera he could have said it was augmented reality. But he didn’t. It’s a phone taped to the end of a cardboard box. It doesn’t seem to have any purpose beyond making the wearer look silly.

Nice. If I find a spare cardboard box here at the office, I’m going to build a similar thing right away using HTC Hero. I must see how augmented reality software (Layar, Wikitude) work with this setup.

i did it with my psp and it was awsome!!!!!
i hacked my psp once to get it to run windows and when it was running windows i put a usb camera and usb lazer sensor into the psp and made an program that sensed specific radio waves and gave me a heads up display (hud) and made a bunch of fake weapons that looked like the ones from halo 3 and then started shooting at my friends and had a huge halo war wearing lazer sensors and putting my (12) VR goggles under our halo helmets.

This is lovely and straightforward. I have built similar things. Unfortunately, they are always front-heavy. I always end up using counter-weights (which make it slightly less unpleasant for short uses but far more unpleasant for long uses). Perhaps he just has better fitted goggles — I always ended up using sunglasses instead and homebrewing the head-band to hold it on.